"It’s important not to overstate the benefits of ideas. Quite frankly, I know it’s kind of a romantic notion that you’re just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what’s key."
~~ Sergey Brin. Interviewed by Jemima Kiss for The Guardian (UK) newspaper, ‘Secrets of a nimble giant’, Wednesday 17th June 2009
Afternoon Folks,
Ironic: I just landed and my cell batteries had died leaving this post queued but unsent until now.
Did you know you can buy a Juice Pack case for you phone which doubles memory life and also carry these spare batteries that look like memory sticks, except they are battery sticks. (Which I keep forgetting about myself, Lindsay??)
All of which leads me to marvel at how far we've come in the 1980s since the cell phone was introduced, and mocked as most innovations are from people set in their ways, afraid of change, unable to (re) IMAGINE a new and better way of getting business done. As Kevin R. Dusold wrote in comment to one of my LinkedIn postings, "Positive change is not inevitable. The only change that is inevitable if you don't change, is the decline of company growth. Many companies resist change, and it is to there disadvantage."
That in mind... April 3 marks the 40th anniversary of the first cell phone call. It was Marty Cooper (Pictured above), a Motorola engineer who made that call in 1973. According to The Verge, Cooper called up Joel Engel, who was also working on a mobile phone at Bell Labs, and said: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." Cooper used Motorola's DynaTAC to make that first call, the brick phone that would gain a permanent place in pop culture through characters like Zack Morris from "Saved By The Bell" and Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street."
It really is incredible to think about how far cell phone technology has come in the past 40 years. The first cell phones weighed over 2 pounds, cost thousands of dollars, and had a battery life of around 35 minutes. At a little under eight inches long, yours for a basic charge of $60 to $100 per month, plus tolls. Carry it to the beach, the supermarket, the yacht, the fox hunt, the golf course, the hideaway where you went to get away from it all. Makes it hard to imagine ever complaining about your smartphone again.
It was an impressive technical feat at a time when people didn't even have cordless landline phones yet. But the press wasn't exactly bowled over. Anyone who thinks 21st-century tech bloggers invented the snarky takedown of a promising new technology should have a look at the Associated Press report that ran in newspapers across the country the next morning:
New York, N.Y.—AP—Dick Tracy may have pushed it. A television set in a wrist watch, for heaven's sake. But that telephone in the secret agent's heel is almost here—if you're the Jolly Green Giant, have a jolly green bank account and can wait until 1976.
That's when Motorola, Inc., hopes to come out with its portable phone,
Zing! In fact, the skepticism was warranted—all the way up until it wasn't. Thanks to technological, regulatory, and infrastructure hurdles, it was another decade before a Motorola executive made the first commercial wireless call on a Motorola DynaTAC phone, in October 1983. And it wasn't until the 1990s that handheld cellphones began to achieve mainstream popularity.
Most reporters were careful to cast doubt on how many would really be willing to pay for that privilege. The Christian Science Monitor piece was headlined, "Really Portable Telephones: Costly But Coming?" A 1980 Washington Post story cited what seemed like an optimistic AT&T marketing study indicating that "as much as 13 percent of the business community would be interested in purchasing one of these advanced systems." But a few early evangelists—surely mocked by their contemporaries—saw even greater potential. In the Globe and Mail in 1983, Jonathan Chevreau wrote (emphasis mine):
Because of the current high cost to users, the popular notion is that of the high-powered business executive making deals by using a telephone in his car during rush hour traffic. But cellular radio is far more than that—the technology ultimately could replace the ordinary telephone, providing a means of communication that would be as personal as the watch or portable radio.
Indeed, one of the offshoots may be that eventually each person will have a "personal telephone number," which could remain the same for life.Far out! But even among visionaries, few believed the technology would ever go quite that far. "Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems," one expert source told the Monitor. "Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won't be cheap enough."
That naysayer? One Marty Cooper.
The DynaTAC was just the start of the cell phone, of course. From brick phone to iPhone, here, Via the Huffington Post, are the most important devices in the cell phone's four-decade history (in our estimation, at least).
Howard H. Aiken, was quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater as saying "don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
We understand.
FSO is in the business of ideas. Every day we help our clients increase productivity, decrease costs, take better care of people and get more done with less resources. Whatever will become the best business invention since the cell phone is mostly taking shape in the labs of our (re) Imagine team, and being rolled out to over 300 clients across 57 cities today.
If you want to know what you are missing, contact me personally for a FREE assessment. Like Motorola's phone of the 1980s, FSO has to be seen, felt and experienced to be believed.
As we think about our individual impact and the difference that we can make, we realize that it affects others. Like with Marty Cooper's passion for his invention of the cell phone, let's ensure that we are always working together to strategize ways to make other's lives better through opportunity. This is the Mitch way.
Let's continue to be an amazing team, working together to find others to come with us on this awesome journey we call life at FSO!
Thanks to Huffington Post and Slate for their reporting and to you for listening.
I hope everyone has the BEST day! Go FSO USA!!
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